Review: Mother, a film by Bong Joon-ho

In the unlikely case you ever wondered about the pointless question of what a Pedro Almodóvar film would look like, had the Castilian filmmaker been born in Korea, I might have an answer for you: it would be something similar to Bong Joon-ho's latest film, Mother.

Mother is a sleek whodunit built around a powerful female figure which eludes genre convention more often than not and which tends to indulge in kitsch surrealism. As it usually is the case with Almodóvar's films, the combination of seemingly irreconcilable doses of elegance and exuberance result in an engrossing and absorbing movie.

I won't give a detailed plot description of the film on account of the genre, but it is hard to talk about Mother without saying that the film tells the story of a murder and of the lengths a woman is ready to go to reveal the truth behind it. As it happens in most brilliant suspense thrillers, the crime and its resolution are not the object of this film. Plot is admittedly a narrative force in Bong's endeavour, but it is not its raison d'être. In fact, one could argue that Bong has achieved in Mother what Flaubert had seeked to attain when he wrote Madame Bovary: a narrative work of art that sustains itself almost entirely on its style.

It is a mesure of Bong's mastery that the account of the criminal story never becomes dull or disconcerting despite the numerous digressions and loose ends he tends to embellish his film with. The filmmaker seems to be conspicuously concerned with style and he makes no secret of it from the outset when he presents the viewer with a baffling and almost perversely fascinating opening scene of dance that will find its continuation (rather than its explanation) later in the story.

The film is visually stunning and creates a rare feeling of unease and suspense through the physicality of the objects. It abounds in images of running liquids and fluids, most notably in a brilliantly orchestrated scene of spilled water that generates much more tension than the more obvious viscous blood we are confronted with in the explicitly violent scenes.

While there is little doubt of Mr. Bong's skills as filmmaker, kudos must inevitably go to Kim Hye-ja for her immense central performance. It is her portrayal of the half monstrous, half human Mother that keeps the film afloat through its snaky narrative without going adrift.

Bong Joon-ho had earned recognition with his previous films Memories of Murder and The Host. Mother has been my first approach to one of his films, but I look forward to discovering his previous and future work.